Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 and buried it to protect film. The task force question nobody wants to ask: is the product paying your bills the one blocking your next one?

In 1975 a Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson came up with a way to take a picture without film. Kodak gave him a patent for it 3 years later, and then the company put the idea where it couldn't hurt anybody.

Film was paying for the building.

The product that funds everything is the one nobody's allowed to question. That's a different problem from a crap product, and it's harder, because the numbers argue for it. The Stop Crap Products Task Force had a simpler job than you do in one respect: the Apple III wasn't selling. Your version of the Apple III might be your best seller.

"We have a lock on the market for film"

Jay Elliot tells the Kodak story at the end of the same chapter of Leading Apple with Steve Jobs that holds the Task Force, and the timing is part of the story. "On the very day I began writing this chapter," he writes, "Kodak filed for bankruptcy."

Kodak was founded in 1889 and was for most of a century the first name in photography. Its own engineer handed it digital photography in 1975. And Kodak, "earning huge sums every year from selling of rolls of film, didn't pursue the idea." Jay puts the company's reasoning in its own mouth: "We have a lock on the market for film; why bother with this new-fangled idea that doesn't fit our vision?"

When it failed, Kodak blamed cutthroat competition. Jay's verdict is shorter. It was because the company didn't have the vision to grasp that digital cameras could capture virtually the entire market.

There's a sidelight he can't resist, and neither can I. The digital camera was made possible by a piece of electronics called the CCD. One of the people on the team that invented it, and who's credited with developing the process for manufacturing CCD-based chips, was Gil Amelio... the same man who, years later, as CEO of Apple, brought Steve Jobs back into the company. Small world, Jay says.

The question the Task Force never had to ask

Everything in this series so far has been about a product that fails. The dot-matrix printer. The Apple III. The division that wouldn't ship a drive. The Task Force's question was whether a product deserved to exist, and when the answer was no, the product left.

Kodak's product deserved to exist. Film was excellent. Film was profitable. Film would have passed every take-home test anyone could have run in 1975, and would have kept passing it for 20 more years. The question Kodak needed wasn't "is this crap?" It was "is this the thing that's keeping us from the next thing?" And nobody asks that question about the product paying their salary.

Jay's own book, It's the Product, Stupid, has the mechanism in 1 sentence, written about why the Mac team needed a building of its own. Without it, "the business that paid the bills would have set the schedule and the priorities for the business that was supposed to replace it, without anyone ever deciding that it should." Nobody at Kodak decided film would set the priorities for digital. Film just did, by default, every year, because it was the thing paying for the building.

What Jay doesn't claim

This is Jay's commentary, not an in-the-room story. He wasn't at Kodak. The dates are public record: Sasson's work in 1975, the patent 3 years later, the bankruptcy filing in 2012. "Earning huge sums" is his characterization, not a figure.

The turn

A task force that only looks for the crap product will miss the profitable one that's blocking the next one.

Steve's line was "no more crap products," and Part 6 was how to run that standard on your line. This is the amendment. Once a year, run it on the product that passes everything, with 1 more question: what is this product's success stopping us from building? If the honest answer is "the thing that replaces it," you've found your film.

Day 1 of the free course is the 4 questions, and the first one is "what are you creating?" Kodak's answer was film. It should have been pictures. Start the 5-day course →

Run it on your product

1. Add a column to your page: what would this product stop us from doing if we kept protecting it?
2. For your best seller, answer it honestly. Write the product it would block. If you can't name one, good. If you can, keep going.
3. Ask the Task Force's question about the blocked product instead of the profitable one: what would it take to make this worthy of the line? Who'd defend it? Who takes it home?
4. Decide, the same 5 ways. Fix, cut, reposition, test, or stop. Then put a date on when you'll ask again.

What this doesn't do: it finds the product you're protecting. It doesn't tell you what the next product is. The 4 questions start there, with "what are you creating?"